RealityNow

Yea I didn't even mention my prior job. They had a mandatory 9:30am attendance meeting that they called "standup", and if I showed up 5 minutes late my manager would joke about it coming out of my bonus. Despite this I don't think he actually cared, but the President did, and ultimately he answered to him. I quit that job soon after and my only regret is not leaving earlier.

Yes, I was consistently late for a software engineering job where 95% of my productive time was spent in front of a computer and "lateness" was arbitrarily defined by upper managers who moved the standup time 1.5 hours earlier to passively start enforcing attendance. Standups went from being a team thing to being mandated top-down by executives completely uninvolved in the day-to-day of our team's work.

Notice I said "didn't appear attentive in meetings". Yes, I was not very enthusiastic about our 15-20 minute morning daily standups where every employee goes around justifying their own existence and reitering what is already on the Jira board.

Yes I was working from home "too much" in a job where I was working from home 1-2 times/week, and for the first 6 months it was never an issue, but then when a new manager took over (with no involvement in our team's day-to-day activities) all of a sudden he had an issue with it. Not because my/our output was any lower than before, just because some marketing executive noticed that my team was working from home more than the others (made more apparent by an open office), and assumed this meant we were probably slacking.

You sound like one of those nightmare "managers" I worked with who destroyed the company's culture and caused the company's enormously high attrition rate with most employee's only averaging ~1 year before quitting for greener pastures. I'm glad I no longer work at companies with corporate drones like you.

PIP isn't a pink slip at all companies. I once got a PIP when working at a mid-sized corporation. Fortunately my performance wasn't an issue, they just didn't like that I was frequently late to the daily morning standup (which upper management refused to allow us to reschedule to later in the day despite my insistence), didn't appear attentive in meetings, and was working from home too much. I started coming in to work on time and stopped coding during meetings and they took me off the PIP a couple weeks later.

Of course I took this as a sign to gtfo of the company, so I started applying, left for a massive promotion and 40% raise, and now I work remotely at a company where we only have standup once every couple days and it's not first thing in the morning. Nobody's micromanaging my work schedule or nagging me for not clocking in at a certain time, and I'm making way more money especially since I don't have to live in SF/NYC anymore and pay nearly half my compensation in taxes and cut a third of my paycheck to a landlord. Funny thing is that I'm actually more responsive/available now because I value my job more, enough to enable Slack notifications on my phone and respond asap (within reason). Couldn't be happier.

You're being pedantic and ignoring the whole point of the article.

This is extremely disturbing, not to mention so ironic that a self-proclaimed "communist" regime is torturing and kidnapping communist activists.

We can debate Marxism here in the comments, but the fact is that nobody regardless of their political stance should have to worry about being kidnapped or tortured by their government. At that point your government is effectively a gang, of no higher moral ground than a bunch of thugs with guns.

Until China fixes their government, they will never be taken seriously on the same level of other "first world" countries. Unless people passively watch Peking University students (statistically harder to get into than Harvard) get kidnapped by their government and do nothing about it.

I wonder what Chinese people think about the odds of any of this improving.

I think it has less to do with merely growing the money supply, and more to do with preventing and quickly recovering from crashes.

The Great Depression was exacerbated and prolonged by us being on the gold standard and thus not being able to use monetary stimulus. Also with a gold standard, there's a limit to how much fiscal stimulus a government can conduct as well because every dollar has to be convertible to gold.

Essentially, fixed money supply = less control. On the surface this might seem like a good thing, and if money is in the hands of a corrupt oligarchy I'd prefer the fixed money supply. But most people don't realize that only 3% of the money supply is printed by the government (the rest is created by private banks), and economic bubbles/crashes and inflation/deflation aren't restricted to fiat currencies.

Mass transit in America is terrible, period (outside of maybe Manhattan, despite the fact that our subway has been getting worse and is in dire need of upgrading). America sucks at mass transit, but for whatever reason Americans don't seem to care. I think it's because they're complacent, don't know any better, and have this toxic "everybody for themselves" mentality that makes it impossible to improve anything that's in the general public welfare.

Well that sucks. Guess those videos are probably gone forever.

My Youtube account got banned 10 years ago with videos on it I made as a teen that are now gone forever. 7 years ago or so I had tried emailing their customer support which of course didn't get me anywhere. Is there any way I can get those videos back? Unfortunately I don't have any contacts at Google, but if I were to get in hold with someone who works there, is there anything in particular I should direct them to do?

I should be upfront and say that I got banned for uploading a video that was deemed inappropriate. I don't really fault them for banning the account, I just wish they had given me the chance to back up my other perfectly appropriate videos. I know those videos probably still exist on some hard drive on a Google server.

It helps anybody who's underpaid. One being underpaid doesn't imply or even suggest that one was discriminated against. I was underpaid my first job, and it wasn't due to discrimination. I would imagine that the majority of people who are underpaid are underpaid not due to discrimination, but due to poor negotiating ability, lack of awareness of the market rate, etc.

My analogy of "we're raising the minimum wage to help women/<insert minority>" still stands.

Also there's evidence to suggest that the gender gap is a myth http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...

Do what you enjoy, and don't be afraid to venture outside of software development. At the end of the day, not everyone obtains fulfillment out of staring at a computer screen all day fixing bugs and developing incremental features onto a piece of software. That's ok - we're human, not robots.

You're still young, so you can try something else (eg. product development) and easily go back to software development if you end up missing it. Or maybe there's another are within tech that'll interest you (eg. blockchain, AI/ML, game dev).

I will say one thing though - software development is probably the best job for money, work life balance, and ease of finding employment

Calling this a gender issue is like saying "we're raising the minimum wage to help women".

The law benefits male employees just as much as it benefits women. Lawmakers and PR teams just like to spin everything as addressing the gender gap to appeal to society-wide damsel in distress syndrome.

It's absolutely absurd that "arrest quotas" are even a thing in America. The job of the police in most first world countries is to protect the people, not make arrests for ludicrous laws. I don't want my tax dollars funding police officers camping out on highways to hand out speeding tickets or arresting random people for having pocket knives on them. No wonder Americans have such an adversarial relationship with the police.

Welfare is capped at a maximum of 5 years, and unemployment insurance - which you don't qualify for if you quit your job - is capped at even less. Meanwhile student loan payments pile up and can be used to garnish your wages and social security.

The Scandinavian countries clearly have far more generous social safety nets.

I had thought you were saying that American food is better than Japanese food, my mistake. Yea as much as I love Japanese food, I wouldn't agree with the statement that NYC's best is superior to Japan's average.

As someone who's also lived in NYC and been to Japan extensively, Japan's fast food and mid-level cuisine is a hell of a lot tastier and healthier than America's. Wrote a bit about Japanese fast food in another comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=15209105

That's a pretty bold and inaccurate brush you painted on Japanese cuisine. Yes western cuisine in Japan isn't that great, but who's eating western food in Japan? Funny you mention mayonnaise also because white Americans are stereotyped with eating mayonnaise sandwiches.

I much prefer Japanese fast food as it's significantly more delicious and healthier. Go into any convenience store and you can get a tasty and healthy onigiri for $1, or a little bento box style meal for maybe $3-4. Of course there's also ramen/udon/soba/yakisoba, curry, okonomiyaki, etc, and all can be had for $3-10 (no tip). Also Tokyo is more of a true 24/7 city, whereas in NYC your options after 11pm are generally limited to cheap pizza, hot dogs, and halal (unless of course you hit up some Japanese restaurants on St. Marks or go to Korea Town).

The thing NYC has going for it is variety. But overall, I still prefer Japanese food.

Either way, we need to move to electronic voting eventually, and inevitably will. The reason being that our political system is broken, and the people don't feel represented. In this day and age, we have the technology to accommodate a real direct democracy instead of our broken representative system, but this isn't feasible without e-voting.

What is up with this societal mentality that the employee is beneath the employer, and the employer has the license to be rude and it's the employee's job to accommodate their bullshit? Sending a resume for a job interview and dealing with an obnoxious recruiter is definitely not a battle I'd pick. If that's how they treat prospective job candidates, then that's probably not a company I want to work for.

You would need a hash to verify the transaction, and hashes wouldn't be publicly tied to one's identity. Thus if I claim that a hash represents me, then there'd be no way for anybody else to verify that. It's a legitimate concern, but not a hurdle that can't be overcome.

So you worked at a polling station that had it's shit together? Great, but that doesn't inspire me much confidence. Though really the main reason I want electronic voting is for convenience (it really is a hassle, and election days aren't national holidays), increased participation, and so that we could move more towards direct democracy and liquid democracy.

What's causing the opioid use? I'd imagine the causation goes both ways.

Has anybody actually asked these people why they use opioids? Or is it just economists running statistical regressions from their ivory towers?

You would also need an elaborate operation involving tons of people to hijack a blockchain-based e-voting system. The beauty of blockchain is that anybody could verify their own vote on the public ledger (eg. like etherscan.io for Ethereum).

I don't know why people have so much faith in black box paper-based voting systems. There's absolutely no way for any of us to verify that our own votes really went through. If there was vote rigging in Florida or New Mexico in 2000, then none of us would know.

In South Korea's 2012 presidential election (won by Park Geun-hye who's now in jail), there's reasonable reason to suspect that the voting may have been manipulated [1]. There was even a documentary made on it called "The Plan". Even if one dismisses this as mere conspiracy, the reality is that there's absolutely no way for us to verify it.

The move to electronic voting is inevitable, and I long for the day that this is commonplace because then it would enable us to do cool things like direct democracy and liquid democracy.

[1] http://mengnews.joins.com/view.aspx?aId=3032435

Pen-and-paper is not observable by anybody. It's a complete black box, and there's no way for me to verify that my vote went through.

With a blockchain on the other hand, anybody could verify that their vote went through (just like anybody can verify any Bitcoin/Ethereum transaction). I'd feel much more confident in this than some black box pen and paper because there's zero way to verify anything under a pen-and-paper system.

What disaster of Ethereum? Ethereum is doing pretty well.

Why can't voting just be done on the blockchain with a public ledger? Any vote could be verified. I'd feel more secure with this than paper ballots, which are very insecure and have been tampered with so many times.

Central planning dictatorships an universal basic income are totally different.

There's no reason that UBI can't be sustainable. And last time I checked, retirees are still receiving their social security checks.

There's a severe shortage of quality jobs and people who want those jobs. An unbelievably high percentage of Americans are either underemployed or working low paying low quality dead-end jobs. Even if this were a small percentage, the fact that even a single person has to suffer or go homeless due to their not being an employer willing to hire this person for a quality job is reason enough for a "living wage".

You suggested that the commenter might be biased against those people and feel above them. Those who oppose a living wage for everyone are the ones who tend to have this attitude because they believe that poverty is the individual's fault.

UBI doesn't limit employees from walking away from their jobs, it enables them to.

> The option to work for yourself isn't taken away by a jobs guarantee.

Obviously. Job guarantee programs however still don't allow you to truly walk away from your job unless you're able to financially support yourself, whereas a UBI does.

Copyright law is so outdated. When are we going to end these parasitic liberty-infringing laws?

Obviously AI could be used to kill people (see last episode of Black Mirror season 3), but can we possibly do about it? Tell people to not research AI? Good luck with that.

I hope some of that $600b in defense spending is being used to counter any sort of AI killer robot threat. But I do think the threat is overblown. AI is pretty damn underdeveloped right now.

Yes, technically buying a stock makes you a part owner of that company. But if the stock is already on the secondary market, you're simply purchasing a piece of ownership from someone else that already exists. This is not an investment in the sense of directly enabling something in the real economy to happen that wouldn't have otherwise (eg. venture capital). Sure you're providing liquidity to a current shareholder, but that's a fairly marginal benefit, and selling your shares will involve taking an equivalent amount of liquidity. This is no more an "investment" in the economy than buying a second-hand home.

The original comment was implying that rich people contribute to the economy by investing their spare savings back into it. I'm not claiming that there's no benefit to buying secondary stocks and derivatives on them, just that this is not even remotely the same in terms of creating economic growth as actually investing in creating new business opportunities and such. It's kind of like saying that trust fund kids who don't work contribute to the economy by spending money. And often this "investment" in the stock market is the mere fueling of bubbles.